“How can we monitor the experience our users are having on XenDesktop and XenApp?”

We get this question a lot whenever we talk to customers, so we know it has their hair on fire. Most of their support calls are rooted in poor user experience, which usually means that users are not seeing their desktop right or their remote display is jittery. Most of the time the problem is network latency.

In my last post, I mentioned three areas where admins have questions that Citrix tools don’t answer very well. One of the most important factors affecting the performance of Citrix XenDesktop and XenApp is the network. Every mouse click, every keystroke and every screen refresh has to travel from the device to the data center over the LAN and maybe over the internet. Users immediately experience any network latency as screen jitter or unresponsiveness in the app.

New version of Foglight for Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp

Foglight includes a User tile for easily finding information on individual users who, for example, have trouble logging in or rendering their desktop. Click on one to see all active sessions for a given user and all infrastructure resources that user’s sessions are using. It helps you map problems in the data center to affected users.

The XenDesktop Session Quick View shows network latency, ICA protocol latency and round-trip time for all active sessions. The left-hand pane lists all the sessions (both desktop and apps) and lets you examine each one. With these graphs you can find the slowest spots and act on them.

Foglight summarizes details for each session, including NetScaler and client/server performance (see below). Latency and network I/O are displayed on either side of the NetScaler device in the middle. It’s the first place you’ll go when a user says, “I can’t log in,” or “I can’t get the desktop rendered on my tablet.”

Your turn

Next time I’ll post about using Foglight to monitor your Citrix environment, another area in which Citrix tools just don’t give administrators enough useful information.